A website can (and really should) be the best thing that ever happens to your business. Creating one, however, isn’t as easy as you’d imagine.
When I was learning the basics of HTML and CSS, I learnt very quickly the importance of having “design morals” when coding a site. Think of these as your own personal rules that you stick to and follow throughout the journey of creating your website.
Silence is golden
My first design moral was music, or rather the lack of music. Whenever I visit a website and hear music, it makes me shudder. With the advent of iTunes, Spotify and Apple Music on billions of devices world-wide, the worst thing a visitor (this is a potential customer we’re talking about here) can be expected to put up with is someone else’s choice in music. There is a time and a place for music so leave it off your website.
The kids are alright
Another design moral I chose when starting to design websites was children. If your website is about promoting a children’s nursery, school or charity, you can save yourself a great deal of stress by not including ANY pictures of children. I have children of my own and can understand how parents may not want pictures of their little princes or princesses plastered over the World Wide Web for all to see.
Cross-browser compatibility
The third and probably most important design moral I always stick to is “browser compatibility”. The importance of this will become clear only after it’s too late. The most popular browser is, at the time of writing, Google Chrome, followed by Safari, Firefox and Microsoft’s (installed by default) Internet Explorer/Edge. All of these browsers handle code differently which can result in some websites being displayed differently on some browsers.
When designing a website, you need to make sure that the code you write your website with is compatible with as many browsers as possible. This sometimes means writing multiple CSS properties and values to cover as many browsers as possible.
Flash…arghh!!
When we started our website design business we decided to use Adobe Flash to create a photo gallery. The gallery looked fantastic and the client was happy. However, support for Flash dwindled over the years, leaving many websites using this technology unable to display their content properly. With advances in more modern web technologies such as JavaScript and CSS, you can now create web pages with complex elements without the need to use Flash or Silverlight.